AE Portal

Rich Young (Twitter: @aerich ) is a long-time After Effects user from the San Francisco Bay Area. His After Effects and Premiere Pro round-ups provide viewers with an easy-to-digest summary of developments. He also supplies info and links for tutorials that allow users to do things in After Effects they never thought were possible....

Andrew Kramer has been the most enthusiastic provider of footage and tutorials on creating shockwave effects in After Effects, and recently Daniel Brodesky created something similar, using Trapcode Particular instead of Fractal Noise for the base of the effect. There are a few other resources too, but much of what's been published is outdated or no longer available.

Expires January 13

B & H had a special today on Senal SMH-1000 Professional Field and Studio Monitor headphones, which seem to be knockoffs of the SONY 7506. The advantage is that they're cheaper today and have two detachable cords of different lengths, which makes it easier to store while protecting against cord failure.

A few highlights

2014 was only a slightly slower year in feature releases, with After Effects development underway that one might assume will help speed work within the app in 2015. In January 2014, the AE team hinted that performance, workflow, and improved creative capability was the main focus behind the scenes, which is great with 4K gaining steam. Performance in Premiere Pro was addressed several years ago and the emphasis now is more on usability and workflow.
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Best of 2014 and holiday gift lists are mushrooming, but there aren't so many lists for digital video creators at this point, and it seems that most of them are on PVC (with more coming). We'll link in a few extra lists, and look back the year in After Effects for more ideas.

Easy-to-use scripts and other resources

ASCII art, pioneered by Victorian female stenographers, has enjoyed brief periods of interest and cobbled together solutions for After Effects, but there's now easy-to-use AE scripts to speed solutions.
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For event recording, it's good to have emergency sealed headphones, and being extremely portable and cheap, earphones fit the bill. Amazon is touting a selection of Stocking Stuffer Headphones Under $10, and when you land there, you're greeted by "Major Sound with a Minor Price." If you shop for $10 headphones, what can you expect? Probably better than that list. Happily, manufacturers sometimes ship inexpensive products that don't sound half bad.

Someday sound will be important in providing cues in visualizations

Cymatics, the study of wave phenomena (often of material media on a vibrating substrate), was popularized by Swiss MD Hans Jenny (1904-1972). Though often discussed in the context of "new age" ideas, DIY techies and artists have expanded interest in the phenomena.

the highest-quality ProRes codec

Apple released a new codec this summer with updates to its video apps, Apple ProRes 4444 XQ. Arri decided to include ProRes 4444 XQ as a recording option in the ALEXA XT & XR. The codec isn't available in Adobe and most other QuickTime-aware apps, but you can manually install it for general use with or without installing Final Cut Pro X 10.1.2.

GoPro Cineform, aka the SMPTE ST 2073 VC-5 video compression standard, is a cross platform codec that in Creative Cloud piggybacks onto QuickTime (warts and all). The codec is available in Adobe video apps in CC 2014.1, and plays system-wide if you download the free player or free GoPro Studio app. GoPro Cineform is a wavelet-based codec that holds up well even after multiple encodes, and features full support for alpha and large frame sizes of 4K and beyond. One important takeaway is that the higher quality options seem to produce smaller files than the lower quality option.

new version + updates and fixes [updated]

FXHOME has announced HitFilm 3 Pro, now available for pre-order for release in late November 2014 for just $299. Hitfilm, available for Mac and Windows, supports modern video workflows that require you to be an editor, VFX artist, and colorist at the same time.

Adobe Anywhere for video is an enterprise-only solution that serves collaboration and remote workflows with version tracking and project sharing for broadcasters and large facilities using Creative Cloud. This workflow lets you edit real-time without dropping a frame via fast WiFi on a Premiere Pro 4K timeline using original 5K .r3d files from remote server on a Macbook Pro.

Adobe Anywhere was recently updated, and some new explanatory videos are available.

a roundup of resources

You can view Adobe's panel discussion with the editorial and post-production team behind the movie Gone Girl from director David Fincher. As you may have heard, the Fincher team leveraged Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects in a workflow based on RED Dragon 6K raw footage files framed in 5K.

Updated with video and additional detail

Today at Adobe MAX 2014, Adobe released a new family of iOS mobile apps and enhanced Creative Cloud 2014.1 desktop tools that enable creatives to access, use and create from anywhere. Details on what's available today are available from the Creative Cloud Team at Creative Cloud: A New Era of Mobile Creativity.